Manufacturers, retailers, and sometimes third party promoters often offer discounts, incentives, and other price reductions to entice potential customers to purchase their products. These price reductions are often distributed on paper coupons that the customer must present at the point-of-sale location to redeem the value of the price reduction. Typically the final retail point-of-sale location is reimbursed for this price reduction by sending the redeemed paper coupon back to the provider that issued the paper coupon along with a record of the transaction for validation. This validation is often done by hand and may be conducted by a third party vendor who verifies that the paper coupon is valid, compares it to the record of the transaction, and then applies any relevant business rules. Not until the end of this tedious process does the retail point-of-sale location get reimbursed for the redeemed paper coupon. This is a time-consuming and expensive process that is prone to fraud and human error. Paper coupons are relatively easy to forge and the infrastructure required to process them is highly labor intensive.
There have been some attempts to provide price reductions in digital form. Some deliver the incentives to the customer in digital format but require the customer to present a printed coupon at the point-of-sale for redemption of the incentive which does nothing to address the reimbursement processing costs. Other systems require hardware connections which are expensive and impractical to implement. Some other systems require the use of mobile devices such as smart phones and personal digital assistants that store all of the customer's information. These systems are prone to loss and also exclude a large segment of the market that does not have such devices. What is presented is a system and method for issuance, redemption, and reimbursement of digital incentives that does not require paper coupons, does not require any additional hardware for implementation at the point-of-sale, and can digitally administer issuance, redemption, and reimbursement to reduce, if not eliminate, fraud in the process.